The publication gathers and presents a series of performance scores, documentary poems, developed during mirko nikolić's artistic research project "water is (non)life: de-extractivist poetics in the semi-periphery." The poetic-critical texts and visuals document a recent history of extractivism in the European resource peripheries, with specific focus on a series of contentious extractive projects impacting rivers and communities in Balkan. Research methodology centres the backgrounded and marginalised visions and voices contesting extractive developments, instead striving for environmentally and socially just alternatives. The narratives also highlights how social movements for environmental and climate justice connect and dialogue trans-locally and trans-nationally. 

The scores featured in the book took place at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, close to a limestone mine in south Norway, at the old iron mine in the island of Utö in Stockholm archipelago, and were presented at exhibitions in Belgrade, Stockholm, Skellefteå, and other places. Correspondingly, the poems move and travel between languages, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, English and Swedish. Part I features 5 versions of "water is (non)life" performance across three languages, moving and transforming through time, place, and across the languages. Part II explores and highlights international dimension of extractivism by focusing on threads tying stories in the Balkans with the public pension savings in Sweden. The book includes a bibliographic apparatus, and closes with "By the River," a critical reflection by Jesper Olsson. The publication was developed in collaboration with Johnny Chang / Living With Images. The photographs featured in the book were authored by mirko nikolić and Duško Jelen.

The project was funded by a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant (2019-02301_VR), and was hosted at the Division of Language, Culture and Interaction, Linköping University.

The ongoing (sub)urbanization and industrialization of land use and oceans (agriculture, fishing, forestry, land and deep sea mining) threatens to wipe out life on this planet. This process is often accelerated by toxic monocultures, because focusing the development of a city or an entire region on one extractive activity degrades other ways of life, eventually leading to “ghost towns” and “sacrifice zones.” To dismantle such monocultures, we should explore the many connections between rural and urban communities and reinvent social and environmental struggles, as mirko nikolić argues in his contribution to the BG text series “Allied Grounds."

From “third countries,” the EU, USA, and China are committed to “securing” access to anincreasing number of minerals and raw materials deemed “critical” or “strategic” both through“onshoring”/”insourcing” and through continued import. This pattern will continue “unequal exchange” with the global South and amplify inequities between cores and peripheries in Europe.Let us observe this from one of the EU candidate countries in the Balkans. From the Environmental Justice perspective, I analyse some major operations and projects connected with copper, iron,lithium – all deemed part of the energy transition.

Studying the history of the exploitation of both labor and environment in the Balkans reveals an enormous scale of destruction and dispossession. Yet even where the machinery of extractivism seems to operate as a totalizing system, resistance from below continues to emerge, as mirko nikolić shows in his contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism” exploring the case of Serbia.

The performance narrates a cycle of stories of environmental injustice surrounding metal mining and processing in the past and in the present. It takes place at the historical site of iron mining in Utö, and reconnects with the reproductive labours that have been taking place with the abandoned mine waters.

Utvinnandet av råvaror har ändasedan bronsåldern varit en viktigcivilisatorisk faktor. Genom bådeessäns och det poetiska partituretsformer ut forskar konstnären mirkonikolic´ en metod för att vittna omde effekter som det ex pan derandeut vinnandet –! extrakti vis men –har på både mänskligt ochicke-mänskligt liv.

"water is (non)life: after empire" is an ongoing art and research work of social reproduction of water worlds. The performative actions spring from the confluence of Danube and Sava Rivers in the Balkans, and move upstream and downstream, connecting contested sites of extraction, historical commodity frontiers and their contemporary expansions, into a shared history-making. The analysis is situated in the uncertain condition of the ‘semi-periphery’ (Blagojević Hughson) – regions bound in the catching-up with the ‘developed’ world - and its specific manifestations in the so-called transition from socialism into predatory and corrupt turbocapitalism.